Gentoo Questions

[madcompnerd]

I'm looking to try Gentoo. But I'm a little intimidated by the install time because I'd like to install in on an old machine, a Cyrix MII with 128MB of memory. It runs RH8.0 well, but I'd like to see Gentoo on it before I invest in switching my main PC.
I read on their site that on a fast PC it can take a week to install. So, on this old Pentium Pro equiv could it take as long as a month or a year? Has anyone installed Gentoo on an old system?
Oh, and for the Gentoo fans. How much speed difference is there really over a compiled distro like RedHat?

[kam]

First of all, it doesn't take a week to install on a fast computer. On my 1GHz it probably took around 20 hours to install the base system, X and GNOME.

As for speed difference, I see no noticeable difference and I personally think it is a waste of time to compile it all from scratch. The only advantage is you don`t have any extra software installed, but you can do the same with other distros like Debian.

[Hayl]

there is a noticeable speed difference with the X Server as well as any Web Browsers that you compile.

the Gentoo kernels are also much faster than Kernels that Red Hat, etc. supplies by default.

[sarah31]

Originally posted by Hayl
there is a noticeable speed difference with the X Server as well as any Web Browsers that you compile.

the Gentoo kernels are also much faster than Kernels that Red Hat, etc. supplies by default.

ummm ... that is because you compiled them with different flags than RH, etc. Say RH was compiling with i386 flags (allows them to be usable on more x86 machines) then of course your flags which are designed for your faster chip will be faster. Gentoo does not have faster kernels they are just faster because you are compiling to your archtecture.

[madcompnerd]

I'd agree with Sarah31. Since RH is pretty much shipped for i386. Except it comes with kernel versions for most major chipsets. But the rest, like X I believe is all i386.